In the course of developing his moral theory, Spinoza sometimes applies it in passing to what he recognizes are traditional moral problems. According to this family of explanations, suicide is a sin because it involves taking a human life, which God has commanded humans not to do. And because, in Spinoza’s view, other humans are more useful to us to the extent that they are rational (E4p35c1), it is entirely to our benefit when others pursue the same good—understanding—that we ourselves seek; for detailed exposition of Spinoza’s argument that it is to our benefit to pursue the good of others, see Della Rocca (2004, 125–8), Kisner (2009), and Grey (2013). This limitation or determination is negation in the sense that each finite mode is not the whole attribute Extension; it is not the other finite modes.

The prohibition included the owning, reading, distribution, copying, and restating of Spinoza's books, and even the reworking of his fundamental ideas. The moral categories, good and evil, are intimately connected with desire, though not in the way commonly supposed. Spinoza was a moral anti-realist, in that he denied that anything is good or bad independently of human desires and beliefs.It also connects the passions to the conatus doctrine: the passions represent changes in the body’s “force of existing” [ existendi vim], and this force of existing is presumably the same force introduced in his discussion of the innate striving of all things to persevere in existing (see section 1 above). For Spinoza, Substance is not the support or bearer of the Attributes, but the system of Attributes — he actually uses the expression "Substance or the Attributes.

W]e ought to think about and meditate frequently on the common wrongs of men, and how they may be warded off best by nobility.And, more importantly, there is no sense to be made of the designation of certain types of human activities as exploitative of the environment or of animals. For an egoist, the question as to what is good for an individual is crucial, for the answer to this question will determine what that individual ought, morally, to do. One factor that determines the force with which an emotion strikes us is whether we conceive of its cause as present.